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Another way of facing concurrency in the wonderful world of doing several task at the same time is using child processes with fork(). The main difference between fork and threads is that forked process are full process, they have their own memory for code, for data and stack, while threads share code and data, and have their own stack.

But, what about sharing variables in forked processes? If we try to make it as simpler as in thread examples, it’s not going to work, because as they are different processes, they are using different memory zones for their data. For example:

In our ideal world, the MAIN process can see the values written by CHILD and vice versa, but the value the MAIN process can access is completely different than the value the CHILD can access, even using malloc before calling fork(). fork() copies the values of all variables before fork(), but the physical memory address is different.

To do that we have to work with shared memory, have to use mmap instead of malloc: